An Israeli soldier’s story
Filed under: A New Reality, General, Israeliness, Life, War
IDF soldiers mourning at the funeral of a fallen comrade.
Our rabbi’s oldest son Didi, an army medic, was part of one of the first units to enter Gaza in Operation Cast Lead, and was lightly injured in the face by shrapnel. In the midst of his four-day hospital stay, Didi’s close friends Nitai and Dagan were killed in one of the war’s regrettable ‘friendly fire’ incidents.
Let’s let Rabbi Schlesinger take over.
After being discharged from the Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon, Shira drove him home to Efrat to change into his dress uniform and then to the Mt. Herzl Military Cemetery to take part in Nitai’s and Dagan’s funerals.
I never knew that Nitai’s parents had such a warm kesher (connection) with Didi. At the funeral, Nitai’s parents, aunt and siblings hugged Didi, thanking God that he was only injured. Didi spent all of Tuesday and Wednesday sitting Shiva with the family. He was part of them.
I returned home on Thursday to see Didi for the first time since I had left for the States. I saw my child in pain – my child was bereaving. He could barely smile and wasn’t ready for conversation. He was clearly in a Shiva mode. He had lost his spark….
Om Saturday night we drove up to Pisgat Ze’ev, a very large neighborhood in Jerusalem (the size of a city) to do a Shiva call. As soon as we walked into the Stern home, Reuven, Nitai’s father noticed that Didi had arrived. He called out “Didi, get over here!”.
Didi went over to Reuven, they hugged and cried – and then Reuven let go and said lovingly “Beat it kid, before I break down.”
Shira and I waited among the many Menachamim (consolers) to get close to the family. We finally got close in order to offer our condolences – when Nitai’s parents Reuven and Sarah both looked at us and asked:
“Are you Didi’s parents?”, we answered “yes” and then they both exclaimed together “Mazal Tov – you have received a gift from God – you have a lot to be thankful for.”
We were overwhelmed with a combination of joy and extreme sadness.
As the rabbi’s wife, Shira, wrote soon after Didi’s injury, “Life/reality for these young handsome strong wonderful “boys,” because they are boys/children that have to grow up so fast and so suddenly, is so different here than anywhere in the world. The pride that they feel within the unit with their friends is so intangible, that only they can understand.”
Didi will always carry a small piece of shrapnel around embedded in his cheek as a reminder of the war in Gaza. But he, and all of the boys and men who fought in this war, will likely carry around something else far deeper in their soul.
A tragedy of the Gaza war
Filed under: A New Reality, coexistence, General, War
One of the most heartbreaking tragedies of the recently completed Operation Cast Lead is the story of Dr Izzeldin Abuelaish, a Palestinian gynecologist from Gaza City who works at Israel’s Sheba Hospital near Tel Aviv.
Abuelaish, a fluent Hebrew speaker and known among his colleagues as an advocate for peace and coexistence, had been a regular interviewee on Israeli news broadcasts during the 22 days of war. On Friday night, three of his daughters were killed by an Israeli shell at the Abuelaish home. The IDF said gunfire had emerged from the home, a claim Abuelaish denies.
What set this tragedy apart from the other innocent Palestinians and Israelis who were killed during the war is that it played out on television According to a report by Ben Lynfield in The Independent, Abuelaish’s raw anguish -captured live on Channel 10 – forced Israelis to take their first real glimpse of the suffering and death caused to Palestinian civilians
Shlomi Eldar, the Channel 10 correspondent, his own voice choking with emotion, repeatedly noted Dr Abuelaish’s connection to Shiba Hospital as he held out his mobile phone, allowing viewers to hear the physician cry and sob: “My daughters, they killed them, Oh lord, God, God, God.”
“I want to save them but they are dead,” Dr Aboul Aish said. In a video of the interview, available on YouTube, the physician can be heard imploring for help while a shaken Mr Eldar pleads on air for anyone in the army who might be viewing to let ambulances reach the Aboul Aish home in the Jebalya refugee camp. “Maybe something can still be saved,” he said.
The IDF allowed ambulances to come straight to the house, and the doctor’s other daughter, niece and brother were rushed to Israeli hospitals – first to Barzilai in Ashkelon and then to Tel Hashomer near Tel Aviv.
Abuelaish, who did his residency at Soroka Hospital in Beersheba, was adamant he had not allowed his house to be a Hamas firing position. “They should just admit they made a mistake. There is no shame in making a mistake, but don’t deceive the nation,” he told the Independent.
Israel Television reported that autopsy reports showed traces of Grad rocket fragments in the head of one of Abuelaish’s daughters, the kind of weapon fired by Hamas, and not the IDF. But there has been no followup on that, and it appears that the IDF shell was the cause of the loss of life.
The high civilian casualty count in the Gaza operation has been attributed by Israel to the fact that Hamas both used civilians as human shields and fired from inside major population centers. Most people I know are able to use that as justification for retaining a clean conscience over the civilians killed.
But the Abuelaish case makes it impossible to ignore the victims on the other side. We can blame Hamas for the deaths of the Abuelaish girls, but we can’t just shirk off responsibility, and say ‘tough luck’. Otherwise, we become as inhuman as our enemy seems to be.
If quiet rains down on the South of Israel now due to the Gaza operation, will the loss of innocent life have been worth it? Perhaps. Could it have been achieved in another way?
Doubtful. But the images of a grieving Abuelaish, a man who epitomizes the possibility that Israelis and Palestinians can one day live together in peace, were a chilling reminder that even in winning a war, we are all losers.
Cease-fire pick up lines
Filed under: A New Reality, General, Israeliness, Life, Music, Pop Culture, War
I'd walk the line for you anyday...
Hot on the heels of the unilateral cease-fire announced by Israel, one email making the rounds on Sunday parodied the ‘Top Ten’ list of American talk show host David Letterman, but with a local twist. Even though it may have originated from a New York Jewish site, it proves that the old adage that war is a great aphrodisiac.
Top Ten Cease-Fire Pickup Lines
10. Let’s do the opposite of disengagement
9. There maybe a cease-fire, but my heart is still burning for you
8. If you kiss me, I’d be glad to respond disproportionately
7. I declare unilaterally that “I’m ready to father your children”
6. Hamas will inevitably break the cease-fire, so let’s use these 10 minutes to make a little peace of our own
5. Care to take these diplomatic negotiations back to my place?
4. A bomb-alarm just went off in my heart, no wait, that’s just Hamas actually firing rockets again
3. So, come to this bomb shelter often?
2. My heart is on Tzeva Adom (Red Alert)
1. U.N. I belong together
For a more sophisticated brand of humor, check out the homegrown Israeli spoof video clip created by the master satirists from the hugely popular TV show Eretz Nehederet.
IBA’s Close Up feeds news jones
Filed under: A New Reality, Politics, Pop Culture, War
Earlier this week, the relatively new free daily nationalist tabloid Yisrael Hayom (Hebrew-only informational website viewable here) reported that mainstream Israeli news websites have been experiencing around a 30% spike in traffic since the start of the current Gaza conflict – hardly a surprise, and hardly a trend relegated to the video-heavy, Hebrew-language outlets cited in their stats.
With the thirst for Zionist-friendly war-related information peaking even among English speakers, the Israel Broadcasting Authority has been wise to initiate the launch of a new English news program called Close Up. Airing Wednesdays at 5:25 PM on the IBA’s Channel 33, the live in-depth weekly analysis magazine Close Up premiered this week with a half hour’s worth of content headed by IBA talking heads Steve Leibowitz and Leah Zinder.
The program joins the growing stable of English-language IBA news reports, which includes the ten-minute weekday News Bulletin and the 20-minute daily IBA News, all of which streams over the web on-demand at the IBA’s video mini-site (like most Israeli websites, works best in the Explorer browser).
For the inaugural episode, Zinder and Leibowitz were joined at the news desk by panelists Effi Eitam, a controversial MK from the hawkish religious National Union, and left-of-center David Horovitz, the editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post. Eitam remarked on the high levels of motivation among IDF, proclaiming that “The spirit of confidence will prevail amongst the soldiers, and, I might add, amongst the citizens.” Horovitz commented on pragmatic goals for ceasefire arrangements.
In other segments, Hebrew University’s Dr. Robbie Sabel, a former legal adviser to the Foreign Ministry, spoke about the ethical issues of the war, reporter Leah Stern gave over a timeline for how diplomacy breakdown led to the current battles, and a visit to opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s office yielded a predictably “I told you so”-style statement.
A textile peace
There was a time, back in the days of Oslo and the peace accords, when several Israeli manufacturers thought about establishing factories down in Gaza, in the Karni Industrial Zone, as a way of utilizing Palestinian labor and forging ties of economic cooperation. There weren’t that many Israeli textile companies left by the late 1990s, but at least one, bedding manufacturer Kitan, had a factory in Karni for a short while.
So when the military operation began in Gaza, my editor at Women’s Wear Daily asked me to do a piece about whether the current situation was affecting local textile companies. It was a logical question, given that goods manufactured in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip and shipped to the U.S. are duty free. But instead of manufacturing in Gaza, private label manufacturer Delta Galil, like other Israeli companies, went to Jordan and Egypt instead, where relations were warmer and the commute wasn’t too bad. And that’s where the underwear that it makes for Marks and Spencer, Target, Victoria’s Secret, Tommy Hilfiger, and other companies are actually cut and sewn, after being designed in Israel, thereby working within the U.S. duty free model.
I’ve written about this phenomenon a number of times over the years, in good times and bad. And when I spoke with my contacts at the remaining Israeli textile companies, Delta, Tefron and Bagir, they all said the same thing, “There’s nothing to write about because we’re not affected.”
And they’re not. Delta’s main plant is in the north, where work didn’t stop during the Second Lebanon War either, even with a solid percentage of Arab employees and Katyushas falling nearby. The same went for Tefron, whose Israeli plant that specializes in seamless underwear is located in the north as well, in Misgav. The only real question mark is Bagir, the innovative suitmaker manufacturer that is located in Kiryat Gat, uncomfortably close to the rest of the southern towns that have been hit in this two-week-plus war. But the answer was the same for Bagir as well, even though they’ve had to conduct bomb shelter drills just to be safe.
I wasn’t able to get to Jordan or Egypt to see what things are like right now in the companies’ factories. I’m told it’s just “business as usual,” says Esti Maoz, Delta’s chief marketing officer, because the “Egyptians aren’t such big fans of Hamas.”
Let’s hope the quiet continues on the fabric front.
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